A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels — Volume 01 eBook

For the space of four days which we spent in the court
of Sartach, we had no victuals allowed us, except
once a little cosmos; and during our journey to the
residence of his father Baatu, we travelled in great
fear, on account of certain Russian, Hungarian, and
Alanian servants of the Tartars, who often assemble
secretly in the night, in troops of twenty or thirty
together, and being armed with bows and arrows, murder
and rob whoever they meet with, hiding themselves
during the day. These men are always on horseback,
and when their horses tire, they steal others from
the ordinary pastures of the Tartars, and each man
has generally one or two spare horses to serve as
food in case of need. Our guide therefore was
in great fear lest we might fall in with some of these
stragglers. Besides this danger, we must have
perished during this journey, if we had not fortunately
carried some of our biscuit along with us. We
at length reached the great river Etilia or Volga,
which is four times the size of the Seine, and of
great depth. This river rises in the north of
Greater Bulgaria, and discharges itself into the Hircanian
Sea, called the Caspian by Isidore, having the Caspian
mountains and the land of Persia on the south, the
mountains of Musihet, or of the Assassins on the east,
which join the Caspian mountains, and on the north
is the great desert now occupied by the Tartars, where
formerly there dwelt certain people called Canglae,
or Cangitae, and on that side it receives the Etilia,
or Volga, which overflows in summer like the Nile
in Egypt. On the west side of this sea are the
mountains of the Alani and Lesgis, the Iron-gate or
Derbent, and the mountains of Georgia. This sea,
therefore, is environed on three sides by mountains,
but by plain ground on the north. Friar Andrew,
in his journey, travelled along its south and east
sides; and I passed its north side both in going and
returning between Baatu and Mangu-khan, and along
its western side in my way from Baatu into Syria.
One may travel entirely round it in four months; and
it is by no means true, as reported by Isidore, that
it is a bay of the ocean, with which it nowhere joins,
but is environed on all sides by the land.

At the region from the west shore of the Caspian,
where the Iron-gate of Alexander is situated, now
called Derbent, and from the mountains of the Alani,
and along the Palus Moeotis, or sea of Azoph, into
which the Tanais falls, to the northern ocean, was
anciently called Albania; in which Isidore says, that
there were dogs of such strength and fierceness, as
to fight with bulls, and even to overcome lions, which
I have been assured by several persons to be true;
and even, that towards the northern ocean, they have
dogs of such size and strength, that the inhabitants
make them draw carts like oxen[1].

[1] It is astonishing how easily a small exaggeration
converts truth to
fable. Here the ill-told
story of the light sledges of the Tshutki,
drawn by dogs of a very ordinary
size, is innocently magnified into
carts dragged by gigantic
mastiffs.—­E.